Quietly so far, but with growing intensity, a new student movement on college campuses is demanding that universities divest their fossil fuel holdings.

While many college students of today are seen as apathetic on most issues, at least when compared to the activism of the 1960s, many are now joining an effort to get their schools (and many other non-profit institutions) to sell off their shares in Mobil, BP, Koch Industries and the other fossil fuel giants in an effort to fight global warming.

For about a year or so, the divestment movement has been spreading across America’s colleges. Last November, for example, a referendum held at Harvard resulted in 72 percent of participating undergraduates voting to urge the school’s trustees to sell off the stock of any large fossil fuel company held in the school’s $32 billion endowment. While the trustees have yet to agree to the students’ demands, that 72 percent who voted for fossil fuel divestment was greater than the percentage achieved with a similar 1990 measure seeking Harvard’s divestment from South Africa over the country’s apartheid policy. Currently, there are fossil fuel divestment battles raging across 256 college campuses.

With current partisan politics causing gridlock in Congress, and the power of the fossil fuel industry limiting any discussion of legislative ways to reduce the use of fossil fuels such as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, many environmental activists, on and off U.S. college campuses, are viewing such tactics as divestment as one of the few remaining options for fighting the dangerous plans of the fossil fuel corporations to extract every once of oil, gas and coal they can.

As leading climate change scientist Bill McKibben points out in his recent Rolling Stone magazine article, “The Case for Fossil-Fuel Divestment,” “The logic of divestment couldn’t be simpler: if it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.”

With the science (and reams of anecdotal data) now showing incontrovertibly that the human use of fossil fuels over the last 150 years is the main cause for the unprecedented global warming and climate change we’re experiencing, the question of how to slow the fossil-fuel Goliath and begin the process of evolving a sustainable energy future is very much on the minds of college students.

It should not be surprising that the nation’s college campuses should serve as a hotbed of discussion and action against climate change. After all, as McKibben pointed out in his article, the universities are where the science and the scientists first discovered we had a problem with all these CO2 gases we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere. It is also at our colleges and universities where the laws of physics and mathematics have made clear that the continued unabated extraction and use of the earth’s fossil fuels will inevitably lead to a decidedly less livable planet Earth.

According to what the climate scientists are saying, if we hope to keep planetary warming to only two degrees Celsius – the maximum increase allowable if we’re to limit the worst effects of climate change – we can only burn 565 gigatons of carbon. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel companies have 2795 gigatons of carbon in reserves, and their goal is to extract and burn every ton.

Another reason college students are a source of activism about climate change is because, unlike many of their elders, they will actually be around when some of the worst effects of global warming become more pronounced.

The challenge of using divestment as a tool to weaken the fossil fuel companies is great. Many of the large universities fear the loss of investment revenue that might result from divestment. But like what happened with divestment from the tobacco companies and those companies doing business with South Africa during apartheid, investors will find another profitable place to put their money.

Eventually the carbon bubble will burst and the science and reality of climate change will catch up will investors. Those who sold their fossil fuel stocks early will have reaped the financial benefit and served their planet well. Those who hold onto their Shell or Mobil stocks will lose in the end, but sadly so will their planet.

For more information about the fossil fuel divestment issue go to www,gofossilfree.org.